At a meeting of the Toastmasters International—Chilean Wine Division—, doña Isabel welcomes her guests and shows off her friend don Paco, as well as Sol y viento’s nueva cosecha, which receives a resounding chorus of ums and ahs. A nosy guest interrupts the good feelings with a question. “What about the rumors that you’re selling the place?”

Isabel: Not in my lifetime, sister!

María brings the party back to life after that exchange by toasting the bright future of Sol y viento. This gets a big thumbs up from Mario, even though he has been put at the working-class version of the kid’s table—along with Traimaqueo and some drifter-looking hippie—, and he appears to be the only person at the tasting who doesn’t have a glass of wine?!?!

Then don Paco announces that he’s helped put together a distribution deal for Sol y viento in the United States. He also whispers to doña Isabel that the vineyard will be able to say adiós a las deudas because of it. And everyone is happy…except for María, who notices that her ex-boyfriend Jaime is standing across the table from her making faces. Um, creepy stalker?

The next morning the gals are going over the vineyards’ debts when don Paco shows up to reassure them that his business deal with the US distributor will get their family business out of debt. But he stresses to María that she’ll have to get more involved in the future.

María: But I don’t know jack about business.

Isabel: What about that norteamericano? Jaime?

Paco: Good idea. He quit his job recently and he has a deep background in wines and vineyards. I looked over his resume, and it’s pretty sweet. Besides, it’s not like he tried to steal the land away from you through a shady business deal involving your now disappeared son and some monolithic power company in the US just a couple of days ago, right?

María: I’m out of here.

Jaime stalks tracks down María at her job site and asks for a chitchat. After beginning to piece together an “I’m sorry,” he gets flustered by María’s description of the situation (“So if I hadn’t been in the middle of all this, you would have continued the deal with Carlos?”) and the fact that they aren’t using tú anymore. When she relents on the pronoun, he also convinces her to take back the necklace he first bought for her back in episode 4. Mario really enjoys that. Hey, where did Mario come from?

Now that he’s buttered her up, Jaime confesses his affection for María. She denies knowing that he was hot for her, so he proves it with a kiss. But enough about love…let’s get down to business.

María: Mom and Paco think you should help run the place, at least until I’m up to speed with the business.

Jaime: What do you think?

María: I think they’re crazy…but probably right. You still have a lot to prove though, buster!

And the last words of Sol y viento are left for the Machi: “And that, kids, is how the earth—as well as a cheeky hombre who lost his connection to the land—was saved. But don’t forget the dumb-dumb who rejected Mother Earth! (Bad, Carlos. Bad.)”

If you’ve spent any amount of time studying Spanish, you probably know that a lot of Spanish words actually come from Arabic…and I mean a lot. It’s estimated that perhaps as much as 8% of Spanish vocabulary is of Arabic origin. That puts it right up there with English as either the second or third largest linguistic contributor to Spanish next to Latin. So with Ramadan–the Islamic holiday of fasting and purification–having started this week, I had the brilliant idea to put together a list of Spanish words from Arabic that I particularly like. (I just discovered that Wikipedia is putting together a much more exhaustive list here.)

The exact linguistical nooks and crannies of how these words became part of the Spanish language is above my pay grade. But generally speaking, most of them came into common use because of the conquest of the Iberian peninsula in 711 AD by the Moors and the hundreds of years of scientific, artistic, and general cultural influence Islam had in Spain because of it. Anyone who has been to Córdoba, for instance, knows what I’m talking about.

I’ve been taking some time recently to investigate a few Spanish resources I’ve had written down on the backs of napkins, bubblegum wrappers, and random scraps of paper. This morning I finally looked into the podcast News in Slow Spanish, and I transferred a couple of episodes onto my mp3 player and took a walk with them in the park. Boy, I’ve been missing out on something good.

The title of the program pretty much tells you what it is: world news read in relatively slow, well-enunciated Spanish. Each program lasts about 45 minutes and usually includes a couple of main stories, some chitchat between the hosts, a review of an essential point of grammar, and a discussion of at least one idiom in the language. The podcast is free, whether you listen to it directly on their website or download it from iTunes or a similar service. There are also a few pay elements on the site if you’re interested in some extras like quizzes, transcripts, bonus lessons, and access to their entire archives.

The program assumes a decent grasp of basic Spanish grammar, as well as a pretty good vocabulary. So it’s generally aimed at the intermediate learner. But there are some parts of each episode that would even be understandable to higher-level beginning students of the language—especially because the words are so clearly said and at such a moderate pace. The one drawback for some folks—especially those learning standard Latin American Spanish—is that the dialect spoken in the podcast is castellano, so expect to hear the vosotros form, a few unusual vocabulary words, and the Spanish “th.” But that’s no big deal, right? All of us Spanish learners should at least be familiar with the way the language is spoken in its mother country, no?

Junior Detective María Sánchez is sifting through piles of Carlos’ forged documents, shaky business deals, and sales offers when the man of the hour steps in. While María assumes that all these documents track Carlos’ trickery, he’s pretty sure that he was just doing what he had to do. And besides, “Since when did you become so interested in the inner workings of Sol y viento, sis? I’ve always had to deal with this stuff by myself.”

María: “Hey, I trusted you, bro. I wouldn’t have dreamed that you were into dirty dealings with filthy, lying capitalist pigs like that…that slightly dreamy Señor Talavera…er…anyway…you aren’t the only one tied to these lands. So yes, while I agree that you’ve had a lot of responsibility as the admistrador of the winery…you’ve been a bad one. I say good day to you, sir.”

Carlos: “Slow down there, girl. Let’s not be too hasty. You know, you and I can still make some cash money on this deal.”

Meanwhile, don Paco takes an oddly involved interest in Jaime’s resume. But after reading it over thoroughly, all he can say is “University of California.” But that’s okay, he doesn’t really have any power to hire Jaime anyway. But the now jobless American isn’t so much concerned with that at that moment, rather he wants to get to that awesome wine-testing festival that Sol y viento is hosting. Apparently he was left off the guest list. Don Paco remedies the situation.

Speaking of the big event, María decides to celebrate it by telling her mother that Carlos is double-crossing, lawbreaking filth. “See, Mom, here are the documents to prove it.” Deudas, deudas y más deudas. Though she made sure to find out that mom has no ill feelings towards her for not going into the wine business first, before exploding the fraternal bomb. Happy wine festival, mamacita!

Mom has Yolanda track down Carlos and she hashes it out with him at pop’s grave.

Mamacita: “I know everything…except where all the money went.”

Carlos: “I invested it in a bunch of tech companies that went bad. Gosh, what do you think I am? Stupid? So I was just going to sell off the winery to pay the debts. Was that wrong?”

Mamacita: “Carlos, your dead father and I agree. Either I’m going to call the police on you or you’re going to have to renounce all ties with Sol y viento and disappear.”

At the party, don Paco tries to put in a good word for Jaime with María. “I think he’s genuinely sorry and he could really help around this place. I mean…he went to the University of California! And hey, I know that you’re normally a cold, brainy booksmart girl who can’t think for herself…but at times we have to listen to our heart. ¿Qué dice el tuyo?”

A nice break in homework this week allowed me to finally finish ¡Así leemos!, which I first wrote about back in November (!). By the way, McGraw-Hill has updated the book since my copy was purchased, and it is now called Easy Spanish Reader—not really a title that inspires much passion from this dilettante, but as I said recently, publishers don’t always make the most interesting choices in life.

Whatever name you want to call it by, the book is a three-part graded Spanish reader that is pretty good for exercising your reading skills. Though I should probably say again that the first section of the book, “Enrique y María,” is rather dreadful unless you’re a preteen, a very low-level beginner, or someone with a preternatural interest in teenagers and high-school Spanish clubs. The second section, which is a short history of Mexico, and the third section, an abridged version of Lazarillo de Tormes, are much more worth your time.

One of the nice things about the book for a self-learner or someone using the text as a compliment to coursework is that it is broken up into very digestible chunks of text—usually only one page with a large font—and each chunk has a series of questions that do a decent job of testing comprehension. While the ¡Así leemos! version of the book that I have doesn’t contain any kind of answer key, McGraw-Hill promises that Easy Spanish Reader does. I also see that the edition sold on Amazon contains some kind of CD-ROM. Either way, it’s a nice addition to your language library if you fall somewhere between beginning Spanish speaker and lower intermediate learner. It gets you reading and introduces some good vocabulary into your lexicon. But if you have a decent grasp of core Spanish grammar, the book will probably bore you a bit.

It’s been a full couple of weeks in the life of this Spanish language dilettante. Our teacher has used them to pour as much grammar as possible into our little brains. A typical day has gone something like this: 90 minutes covering/practicing the pluperfect indicative tense, followed by a break, 90 minutes on the pluperfect subjunctive, another break, an hour of computer work, and then for homework…maybe ten workbook activities, an essay, and an oral recording submitted over email. Yikes! But because of that pace, we’ve finished all the major grammar points of the Spanish language as of today. Next week is just review and a series of short readings. Oh, and then we have a little old final exam to finish things off. Bring it on, profesor!

One of the sources I’ve been using to try to digest all the various verb forms that we’ve been going over in class the last six weeks is the website Conjuguemos. While it is not fancy and is by no means comprehensive, the site allows you to take timed (or untimed if you want) quizzes that are all about conjugating verb forms correctly and nothing else. You can choose to work in any tense in any of the four moods, or you can use the “comprehensive conjugator” to work in all the forms of the subjunctive and indicative moods simultaneously. You can also select to work specifically on one pronoun, or add/eliminate vosotros from the quizzes.

The site also has quiz work for vocabulary and other parts of grammar, in addition to verbs, but I’ve mostly stuck to the conjugation tests so far. Taking a five-minute quiz just before doing homework or heading off to class has been a good warm-up for me and can help anyone get into that Spanish frame of mind.

It’s not surprising to find out that as grammar gets more difficult, it becomes harder to find free web resources on the topic. Such is the case with my new favorite point of grammar…the dreaded adverbial clause. Now if I had heard about this nasty little animal from the grammatical zoo before last week, I sure as heck didn’t remember it. I suppose one of my high school English teachers covered it while I was doodling pictures of skulls and snakes in the back row of class (I was lamentably a heavy metal kid who aspired to be a album cover artist in those days).

Boringly stated, they’re clauses with a subject and predicate that act like an adverb by modifying the verb in a sentence. Thus they answer why, when, where, and how. Examples: I cried when I saw Bambi’s mother die. We all went to the tapas bar to celebrate after we finished our Spanish test. But like seemingly everything else in Spanish (preterite vs. imperfect, conocer vs. saber, estar vs. ser, etc.), you often have a choice to make when you use adverbial clauses: subjunctive or indicative mood. As native St. Louisan Yogi Berra once said, “When you come to the fork in the road, take it.” Here are some resources to help you with that decision.